To facilitate satellite broadcast service for a residential user, a satellite service provider installs one or more “satellite dish” antennas at the user's residence. The satellite dish will commonly be placed on the roof, attached to an exterior wall with appropriate (e.g., southern) exposure, or mounted on a pole in the yard, as long as line of sight with the satellite is not obstructed by trees, mountains or other structures. However, for potential users in higher-density housing environments, such as “multi-dwelling units” (MDU) in which individual housing units for residents or tenants are contained within one building or several buildings within one complex (e.g., apartments, condominiums, office suites, commercial and hotels), the provision of individual satellite dishes to each user may be impractical or even prohibited. Not all residents of multi-dwelling units have an exterior wall or balcony with appropriate exposure, and those that do may be blocked by adjacent structures. Additionally, building codes and community rules (e.g., condominium association rules) may restrict the use of satellite dishes.
To address these issues, satellite service providers may install local content distribution systems within large multi-dwelling units to service multiple units/users from a single satellite dish antenna. A common dish may be used for each individual units/user and various electrical components are used to distribute the signals to the individual units/users. One of these components is a single wire multi-switch (SWM) module that can distribute satellite TV signals to multiple receivers (e.g., a set top box) from the common dish. Some SWM modules may provide thirty or more channels, which are frequency blocks. Thus, the SWM modules can accommodate up to thirty receivers that each include a tuner that is assigned a channel, assuming one channel per tuner. However, some MDUs require more than thirty channels. Thus, technicians must install multiple SWM modules to service the MDU. Having more than one SWM module requires splitting the signal provided on the satellite dish antenna to each SWM module, which in turn requires splitters, extra cabling, and most likely amplifiers to account for the signal loss due to this extra equipment. Furthermore, each SWM module requires a power supply, and thus given the size of some data closets, the additional equipment creates and unorganized environment, provides more points of failure, and is difficult for a technician to determine the wiring topology, thus increasing service time when servicing the local content distribution system or requires the addition and/or removal of devices from the local content distribution system. Reducing the time and the number of components for the local content distribution systems is desirable.
Thus, the Applicant recognizes that there is a need for an improved local content distribution system.